'Lending Libraries in Their Yards'

A story and sidebar about books on page one? Every Thursday I read our weekly neighborhood newspaper, The Leader, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. I delivered such a paper as a kid. Almost the only things my parents read were newspapers. My first job in journalism was editing a small town weekly (The Leader Enterprise). Now The Leader is the only newsprint – ink on paper – I touch, except when a neighbor passes along his Wall Street Journal.

In the print edition, the story is played above the fold with a 36-point boldface head: “Bonding with Books.” The reporter, Betsy Denson, localizes a national effort started in Wisconsin in 2009 called Little Free Library. Book lovers build birdhouse-like structures and post them in their front yards, in parks, even in laundromats (according to the sidebar). The idea is Jeffersonian – the free, unfettered exchange of reading material. The national organization reports some 100,000 such boxes have been set up in all fifty states and 108 countries. Our neighbors two doors to the south have one, stocked with children’s books. Here is Denson’s lede:

“During a summer when everyone could use a little more escape, the Little Free Libraries in area are a way for individuals and families to offer a window to the world and promote the love of reading through the lending libraries in their yards.”

She’s no Murray Kempton but to her credit Denson is industrious and interviews at least nine people for her story. Seeing these book boxes brings out the neurotic in me. Do they leak? Will the books get soaked? Most I’ve seen have glass fronts. Won’t the sunlight bleach the covers? Not to mention thieves and vandals. There’s another problem, explained by Charles Lamb in “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" (1822).

“I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.”